In San Diego disability is self insured, meaning whatever disability claim the city gets from city workers come out of the general fund (the tax payers pocket). In a city this large it probably makes some sense to do this, why pay the overhead to an insurance company. Of course it’s just tax payer money, so nobody really cares if there’s fraud going on. A private company that is looking out for it’s bottom line would probably care a lot more if there was fraud going on and would probably spend the money to investigate it.
I did a project for RISK management about 10 years back and firefighters tended to be the worst in terms of committing these type of acts. We were importing time records from a mainframe into a new database and we’d get failures because fire fighters would have more than 24 hours booked in a day. 8 hours light duty and then 24 hours of regular pay in a day. I was young and naive at the time but if it was today I probably would have reported it.
Things might be better now, it was a long time ago, but I somehow doubt it.
